A. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising, such as on-line advertising. More particularly, the present invention concerns helping on-line advertisers to target their ads.
B. Description of Related Art
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Advertisers have used these types of media to reach a large audience with their advertisements (“ads”). To reach a more responsive audience, advertisers have used demographic studies. For example, advertisers may use broadcast events such as football games to advertise beer and action movies to a younger male audience. However, even with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted because the target audience is not interested in the ad they are receiving.
Interactive media, such as the Internet, has the potential for better targeting of advertisements. For example, some websites provide an information search functionality that is based on query keywords entered by the user seeking information. This user query can be used as an indicator of the type of information of interest to the user. By comparing the user query to a list of keywords specified by an advertiser, it is possible to provide some form of targeted advertisements to these search service users. An example of such a system is the Adwords system offered by Google, Inc.
While systems such as Adwords have provided advertisers the ability to better target ads, advertisers would like to have help so that they can target their ads more effectively and/or more easily.
It would be useful, therefore, to have methods, apparatus and data structures for helping advertisers to target their ads more effectively and/or more easily.